My Breakdown

Y NEWS                                                NAME: Florian Ruch                                        ARTICLE BREAKDOWN

ARTICLE #1 TITLE: Europe watches Swiss immigration vote

HOOK:  Swiss voters are going to the polls on Sunday in a nationwide referendum on immigration which is being watched closely right across Europe.

WHO: Swiss people

WHAT: The proposal, from the right-wing Swiss People's Party, calls on Switzerland to abandon its free movement of people treaty with the European Union and introduce strict quotas on immigration.

(Vote to approve or not a law which would make harder for foreigners to come to live in Switzerland.)

 WHERE: In Switzerland

WHEN: 9 February 2014

WHY: Because Switzerland is too crowded; not enough habitations, not enough jobs, common transports too crowded.

HOW: It is a project of law that got 100’000 signatures, so the law has been voted.

QUOTES: "It's getting too crowded," says farmer Martin Haab. "On the roads, on the trains, especially in the cities."     

"It's getting too crowded," says farmer Martin Haab. "On the roads, on the trains, especially in the cities."      

"With free movement now, we know that only 50% of the immigrants work here," explains Mr. Haab. "The rest are just families."
"We depend on a highly skilled workforce," Stephan Camenzind explains. "And that workforce we simply can't find in Switzerland, so we do depend on being able to look for talented staff in the European Union."
"Well it's quite simple," says Mr. Camenzind. "We would have to shrink. We would lose our critical mass to compete globally, so basically there wouldn't be a business anymore."
"It concerns me in the sense that being able to move around freely and work in Europe [is important], I would find it very limiting if you couldn't do that." Says employee Claudia Berkefeld, a German employee.
"Integration into the single market is absolutely crucial to our economy," he explains. "Over 55% of all our exports go directly to the European single market. We import over 80% from that market.” Says Jens Atteslander, an economist with the Swiss Business Federation. "We got very clear statements from Brussels. They tell us: 'Listen, this is the fundamental principle of the single market, those who do not comply with it do not have access or integration into the single market.' We are here in a closed neighborhood, we are in the heart of western Europe, so there is no alternative."

DETAILS: Switzerland is not a member of the EU, but has adopted large sections of EU policy, including free movement and the Schengen open-borders agreement, in order to have access to Europe's single market.

In 2013, 80,000 immigrants joined Switzerland's population of eight million. To put that in perspective, that would be the equivalent of more than 600,000 people entering the United Kingdom, or more than 800,000 arriving in Germany.

A yes to free movement will mean an open door to EU workers.
A yes to quotas could have potentially disastrous consequences for the Swiss economy. But it will also be a signal to Brussels that at least one European country wants to opt out of one the EU's most cherished policies.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26034566

Y NEWS                                                                NAME: Florian Ruch                                        ARTICLE BREAKDOWN

ARTICLE #2 TITLE: Swiss Vote Seen as Challenge to European Integration

HOOK: LONDON — European officials warned Switzerland on Monday that it would pay a steep price for its vote to limit the flow of workers across its borders

                                                                  

WHO: European people, Swiss people.

WHAT: Swiss vote will change relationships between EU and Switzerland. Swiss vote inspire European’s far right parties to leave EU

WHERE: Europe/Switzerland

WHEN: 9 February 2014

WHY: Because Swiss people decided to stop massive immigration and it will break the free movement law in EU.

HOW: The vote’s decision has been pushed by Switzerland’s far right party, they made people fear against foreigners.

QUOTES: Daniela Schwarzer, a German expert on the European Union with the German Marshall Fund in Berlin, said that “freedom of movement has become a subject of worry” for Europeans. “The result of the referendum will have a strong impact on the euro-sceptic parties,” she said.

Mr. Wilders said in The Hague. “That we can end the mass immigration and stop paying welfare checks to, for instance, the Bulgarians and the Romanians.”

Eamon Gilmore, the Irish foreign minister, said that there was a “growth in the extreme right agenda” across the European Union and that it was “quite xenophobic.” He said the vote would pose “major difficulties” for freedom of movement, which is a “cornerstone of what the E.U. is all about.”

Viviane Reding, the justice commissioner of the European Union, said Monday that acceptance of the single market for goods, people and capital was all or nothing. “You cannot have a single market with holes in it,” she said.

Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, said that the vote was bad news “both for Europe and the Swiss” and that Europe “was going to review its relations” with Switzerland.

The U.K. Independence Party’s leader, Nigel Farage, said Monday, “This is wonderful news for national sovereignty and freedom lovers throughout Europe.” Striking familiar themes, he said, “A wise and strong Switzerland has stood up to the bullying and threats of the unelected bureaucrats of Brussels.”

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a German-French European legislator, said that if France had voted on the same proposal as the Swiss, “it would have been worse, with 60 percent voting ‘yes.’ ”

European officials said Monday that they would not accept the imposition of quotas on European Union citizens and that Switzerland could lose its access to the single European market.

DETAILS: Days before the Swiss vote, Geert Wilders, the anti-Islam Dutch politician, issued a report he commissioned from a London consulting firm trying to show that the Netherlands would be better off leaving the European Union. While there has been criticism of the study, carried out by Capital Economics, Mr. Wilders has turned his party’s emphasis from opposition to Islam to opposition to the European Union, and his Party for Freedom is likely to elect the largest number of European legislators from the Netherlands.

The vote in Switzerland, which is not a member of the European Union but has broad agreements with Brussels, was very close, with the measure favored by just 50.3 percent of those who voted in the referendum. It gives the government three years to come up with legislation imposing immigration quotas and to negotiate with Brussels on how to manage that legislation.

Switzerland had agreed to its rules on freedom of movement to benefit from effective integration with Europe, including freedom of trade and movement of capital — which are all now in doubt.

But every country of the European Union, except Germany, has a substantial anti-immigrant, anti-European party, all playing on the idea that the European Union has grown too large, too powerful and too distant, and that the openness at the heart of the European experiment has gone too far, diminishing national identities and values and creating economic distress, intra-European competition for jobs and too much pressure on social services from immigrants.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/11/world/europe/swiss-immigration-vote-raises-alarm-across-europe.html?_r=1